5 Savants and Their Incredible Abilities

1. Kim Peek

Kim Peek is the real life Rain Man whom the Dustin Hoffman character was based in the movie. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he had learned to read by the age of 2. He reads at a phenomenal rate, a page that may take you or I three minutes will take Kim about 10 seconds. He reads the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye and will retain about 98% of it. Most savants have only one dominating interest, Kim seems to soak up everything. His interests range from boxing, to politics, to the British Monarchy.

2. Daniel Tammet

Daniel claims that since the age of four, he has been able to do huge mathematical calculations in his head. The makers of a documentary put him to the test, asking him to calculate 37 raised to the power of 4. He completed this in less than a minute, giving the correct answer of 1,874,161.While considering the question, it was observed that, he appeared to be drawing shapes on the table with his finger. When asked about this, he explained that he could see the numbers as shapes and colours in his mind.

Next he was asked to divide 13 by 97. This time the researchers had the answer to 32 decimal places, Daniel gave the answer and continued beyond 32. He claims he can do the calculations to 100 decimal places.

He is also very gifted with words and speaks nine languages and claims to be able to learn a new one in just seven days. This was put to the test for a documentary and after just 7 days tutoring he was put on Icelandic television and successfully and convincingly answered several non scripted questions. Icelandic is a notoriously difficult language to learn.

In March of 2004, in Oxford, England, began to recite the number Pi to 22,500 decimal places, in public in front of a team of invigilators to verify his accuracy. After just over five hours he had completed this extraordinary memory feat without a single mistake.

3. George Widener

Give George Widener any date in history and he can, within seconds, tell you what day of the week it was. At his home in Asheville, North Carolina, George works into the night drawing elaborate calendars. Before bed he reads, not a novel but, printed sheets of population figures.

4. Jedediah Buxton (1707-1772)

He measured the whole lordship of Elmton, consisting of some thousand acres (4 km²), simply by striding over it, and gave the area not only in acres, roods and perches, but even in square inches. After this, he reduced them into square hairs’-breadths, reckoning forty-eight to each side of the inch. His memory was so great, that in resolving a question he could leave off and resume the operation again at the same point after the lapse of a week, or even of several months.

5. Thomas Fuller (1710-1790)

Born in Africa, Fuller was taken to Virginia as a slave in 1724. He was a calculating wonder who could easily multiply nine-digit numbers. At the age of 78, Fuller, who was never able to learn to read or write, was asked, `How many seconds has a man lived who is 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours old?’ Ninety seconds later he gave the answer – 2,210,500,800. Informed that he was wrong, Fuller corrected his interrogator by pointing out that the man had forgotten to include leap years.

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